The Self-Optimizing Enterprise: Where AI Meets Reality - Business Transformation World 2026 Panel Discussion
Building Enterprises That Learn
At 2026's Business Transformation World Summit (BTWS) in Miami, Dan Dantus, VP of Agentic AI Solutions at Skan AI, spoke with Ashutosh Chaudhari, Senior Director, Process Excellence and Intelligent Automation at Cisive, and Puneet Arora, Senior Program Manager at Google. Listen in as they reveal what it really takes to build enterprises that don't just automate—they learn, adapt, and evolve.
Key Insights
1. Beyond Automation: What Self-Optimization Actually Means
Discover the three-agent framework transforming enterprise operations: Scout agents that discover processes as they actually happen, Guardrail agents that keep execution safe and compliant, and Sentinel agents that create true self-healing systems. This isn't just workflow automation. It's reinforcement learning applied at enterprise scale.
2. AI's Game-Changing Impact on Process Intelligence
Learn how AI eliminated the army of business process engineers manually mapping workflows. See how modern process intelligence captures the real telemetry of work—not someone's opinion of what they think happens—and automatically detects drift from designed processes in real time.
3. Speed vs. Quality: The False Trade-Off
Understand why you never actually trade quality for speed. Discover the crawl-walk-run framework for AI deployment, how to set confidence thresholds for human-in-the-loop intervention, and why designing evaluations backward from outcomes is the secret to moving fast without breaking things.
Real-World Battle Scars
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The $70M Wake-Up Call:One small process error triggered an automated workflow that created a $70 million credit and rebill disaster in 12 hours. The cost wasn't just the shock on customer faces—it was weeks of unwinding the error and rebuilding trust. This is why visibility matters. This is why process intelligence isn't optional.
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Google's Phony Vendor Problem:Millions in fraudulent invoices paid to scam vendors because human workforce can't three-way match millions of daily invoices. The solution? Agent guardrails with automatic checks for 90% of preferred suppliers, human intervention only for the 10% of exceptions that matter. That's where your analysts should focus—not copy-paste between Excel files.
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The Shadow Process Reality:Teams map processes with business analysts, create documentation, store it on SharePoint. Then process mining reveals 50% of work happens in Excel and Teams—completely undocumented. People use muscle memory to execute steps they forget to mention. That's why you need agents sitting on desktops, capturing every action across users and departments.
Critical Insights
- Processes Are Your Crown Jewels (Again): The more telemetry and signals you capture from your business, the more your company's competitive advantage goes online. Protect it like you'd protect any IP—because uniqueness, not sameness, is how you win.
- Deterministic vs. Probabilistic AI: GenAI is great for productivity. But finance is deterministic—1% error breaks SOX controls and triggers audits. You can't use probabilistic tools for rigid processes. That's why agent guardrails implement "policy as code."
- Human in the Loop vs. Human on the Loop: The future isn't eliminating humans—it's elevating them from analysts to workflow designers. From approving individual transactions to designing the logic that governs agent execution. Think Waymo operators monitoring self-driving cars and handling edge cases.
- Start Small, Scale Systematically: Run a POC with 4-5 people in one department. Prove it works. Establish compliance guardrails. Set confidence thresholds. Then expand gradually. Tesla had kill switches in robotaxis before going autonomous. Your agents need the same crawl-walk-run progression.
- Evaluation-First Thinking: Don't design automation then figure out how to measure it. Work backward from evaluations. Measuring car accidents is too late—measure leading indicators like following traffic signs and avoiding close calls. The work to design evaluations IS the work to design automation.
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